Feedback

[Dick Karpinski <dick -at- CCNEXT -dot- UCSF -dot- EDU>]

I'd like to encourage everyone who maintains a publicly available
archive, in whatever form, to make it obvious to the reader how to
offer comments, ammendments, and references to other things on and
off net.  For example, in Gopher, my plan this afternoon is to add
a single menu item in all or most menus which tells about the
purpose of this section of the archive and suggests an email address
or several for comments etc.  This task is easy if tedious.  It
would be easy to automate.  (Wanna try?)

If we let essentially everybody on the net offer such notes, they
will do so.  Witness 30-50MB/day of Netnews.  If we make those notes
available by putting them into the archive, in short order, the
Internet will become a richly annotated, richly interconnected web
of information about everything.  That's a little ambitious, isn't
it?  Not for me, it's not.  While it would indeed use an immense
amount of disk space, consider what we're getting for it.

Take a typical tech report.  It's on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper and pages
have about 2000 characters each.  A megabyte of it takes 500 pages
which would cost $25 to make a Xerox copy.  The disk space costs $1.
It really is 25 times cheaper to publish to the world, than to make
a single Xerox copy.  I'll bet there's a lot of information that is
more valuable than that and that people will share, willingly.

Incredible, but true, right?  In a real sense, this note itself is
an example of the mechanism working.  Somebody other than me and my
company is paying for me to shoot my mouth off to you and anyone
else who cares to look.  But how will they find it?  That's the
richly interconnected part.  If we get people to think about the
links as appropriate, but sometimes missing or wrong, each of us
has the opportunity to repair the problem by the expedient of
sending email in the right direction.  That's what began this note.

If this makes sense to you, what are you going to do about it?

I'm about to start such lists as Vendors, Concepts, Products, and
Books.  In my present view, each entry in one of these lists would
be a screen or two with a place for comments and links to be added.
Then I let a million people add what they think makes it better.
One particularly valuable contribution is a revision of a text or
a list to ignore the chaff.  Wouldn't you rather have the choice
of several reviewers picks of the best articles in the last week
of Newsgroup X than to have to slog through it yourself, without
benefit of others' opinions?  I would.

Are you going to do anything about it?

Dick Karpinski (dick -at- ccnext -dot- ucsf -dot- edu)